Grand Theft Auto 5‘s loading times have been the butt of many a joke over the last seven years—even the beefiest of PCs will leave players twiddling their thumbs while that blonde lady throws a peace sign at her phone for the millionth time. The agonising wait has led one savvy player to delve into the game’s code, and with some tweaking has managed to reduce the loading times by almost 70%.
GitHub user tostercx has uploaded the fixed code, though they do warn that it’s more of a proof of concept and not intended for casual use. They were also kind enough to provide a breakdown of the entire process.
The lengthy loading times—tostercx experienced a six minute wait for GTA Online to boot up—are, in part, attributed to some terribly optimised code and a 10MB JSON file containing 63,000 item entries. Every time an item is found, the check then runs again… and again. tostercx estimated that this leads to around 1,984,531,500 checks.
This, along with the fact the game was only loading from a single core on tostercx’s CPU, appear to be the biggest bottlenecks. But after a couple of fixes that optimised the code, tostercx was able to reduce the loading time to a much more digestible one minute and 50 seconds, a 69.4% improvement on the original time.
It’s a huge reduction, which tostercx claims shouldn’t take “more than a day for a single dev to solve.” They even leave some suggestions for Rockstar, ones which hopefully will be acted on—though it’s doubtful given how long players have put up with long load times already.
If you’re still diving into Los Santos, why not use those impossibly long loading times to check out some of our GTA Online guides, like how to make money quickly or the speediest cars that deserve a place in your virtual garage?
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